To heart, or not to heart, Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is tomorrow. Seriously, is there any worse faux-holiday? It causes me such anxiety whether I am single or not (which I am). But I love it all the same…

When I was a little girl, Dad used to get me a mini version of whatever he got Mum. Mum would normally get a bunch of flowers, a big heart shaped chocolate and a diamante encrusted heart shaped pin with her name engraved on it. I would get a little flower, a small heart shaped chocolate (or heart shaped lollipop) and a plain heart shaped pin with my name engraved on it. As much as I loved it, I felt I was intruding on their Valentine's Day.

When I was a little bit older, Mum left Dad. In the first week of February. Valentine's Day just made me so sad. Dad kept my brother and I. Just days after Mum left, Dad took us to a florist. He ordered a huge bunch of beautiful red roses to be delivered to Mum at her mother’s place. The florist asked my dad what he would like written in the card. He proceeded to recite one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever heard. I asked where he got it. He told me he wrote it in his head a few nights prior and memorised it. I am certain that, collectively, all three of us held our breaths to see if this gesture, this last chance to be a family again, would work. It did not.

Years later I found the card she received from “the other man” that same Valentine's Day. It went with a bear that once replaced Puppy that time I forgot to bring him with me to Mum’s house. I threw that horrid bear out of my room and refused to let him ever come back in. No one ever asked why and I never found the card my dad sent her.

When I got to high school, there was a shame-inducing tradition of selling flowers to be delivered throughout the school. $2.50 got you a dying carnation with a small badly cut up tag tied on with cheap ribbon and your chosen sentiment hand-scrawled by a grade 12 girl who couldn’t care less. My first year there, my friend and I panicked at the horror of being the only girls not receiving flowers come Valentine's Day. Luckily we both received ‘From your secret admirer’ flowers. Turns out $2.50 can also buy insurance against being one of those girls who didn’t receive a flower.

I didn’t receive another flower until grade 12. That year I received one from a dear friend telling me “blonde becomes me” and another was one of the sweetest gestures I’ve ever received. My best guy friend (and technically ex-boyfriend) had a rose delivered to me asking me to be his date for the formal. Everyone in the grade knew I was getting this flower and when I looked up from reading it, every girl in the class was looking at me before one brave girl (funnily enough, the ex-friend who was in on the secret admirer scam from years prior) blurted out “Well, what are you going to say?” For the girl who was picked on mercilessly, the fact that I was the only girl to be asked to the formal through a flower and the first of all the girls (save the ones with boyfriends, I expect) to be asked to the formal meant the world to me. I had been dreading the formal for years, fully believing no one would ask me, purely thanks to the social stigma of being “the milk girl” (I worked on a milk run after school) but instead, I was the first girl to be snapped up!

That special moment was only a counter-balance for the fact that I had no way of stopping the crappy carnation that was winging its way to my ex-boyfriend who’d broken up with me on the 12th. That was just awkward for all involved. But my dad made it better by having big ugly plastic roses in the car for me ad my best friend when he picked us up that afternoon to drop us into the Brisbane Motor Show.

I had a boyfriend most Valentine's Days since then. But my heart still always breaks for my dad. I know that every Valentines Day he just remembers the last one he tried to share with my mum. He thinks of that poem, those roses and that desperate clinging to the family we once had before it slipped away forever. I always try to do something special for my dad. Ex-boyfriends of the past know that my dad is my main Valentine. Two years ago I bought him a black rose with a note that said “For the only one who can see the bright side of my dark side”. I don’t remember what I got my boyfriend at the time.

Last year I tried to kill myself just days before Valentine's Day. I say that bluntly, but a fact is a fact. It wasn't anything to do with Valentine's Day. My dad took me to a movie about life-after-life. I just cried and told him I wanted to die. This year, I need to make it up to Dad.

The boyfriends that I’ve had usually spoilt me. I have photos, teddies, cards, jewellery and fake flowers from many years and boys gone by.

This year is the first Valentine's Day I remember for a long time that I will be single (last year was a blur of suicide watch and therapy). I don’t know what to make of it. Obviously Dad will be my main Valentine again. But as a girl, its nice to know someone is thinking of me - thinking that I’m special, thinking that I’m beautiful, thinking that I’m worth something, anything, on Valentine's Day.

I know its a Hallmark holiday that isn’t even worth the cheap paper that all those cheesy, sappy, soon-to-be-thrown-out cards are printed on, but I still want to be part of it. Everyone says it’s just a gimmick and a poor excuse to make couples spend money and that’s totally true. But no one wants to be excluded. I could shout from the rooftops and use my blog as a stand and say “No to Valentine's Day” but I don’t want to. I like the sentiment. I like the feeling of being special, in some way, to somebody. Whatever reason that may be. I don’t want to just feel like the girl who is in the way, the girl who’s future with a live-in mother hangs on a poem, the girl who sends herself a “secret admirer” flower, the girl who feels the shame of giving an unwanted Valentine's day gift, the girl who spends Valentine's Day making sure her dad is ok… but I don’t need to be the girl who received an $80 dozen roses, the girl who wakes up to a serenade outside her window, the girl who sees a proposal hanging on the overpass on the way to work, the girl who is whisked away for a romantic dinner for two… I just want to be the girl who knows she is special… to somebody…

Miss SAMawdsley xx

Questions:

• Do you celebrate Valentine's Day?
• What does the holiday mean to you?

I'd like to wish a very happy Valentine's Day to some wonderful people who may be reading this.

Lori - who deserves all the love in the world

My best friend - who has been there for me every day for 21 years
Adam's mummy - who is spending her first Valentine's Day in 10 years as a fabulous single girl

Player - who sent me love purely for the sake of love

Simon - who is the best guy a girl could ever ask for

Someone - who has taken a tiny piece of my heart to a far off world. You damn well better bring it back one day! "I like you!" xx

Panic attacks & thanatophobia

Imagine you know for certain that tomorrow you will die. There is not a thing you can do about it, tomorrow will be your last day on earth and tonight will be your last night. How would you feel? I can’t imagine many people, if any, would answer with anything that isn't fear, frustration, anger, confusion or sheer panic. Well I don't know for sure that I will die tomorrow. But what I do know for sure is that there will come a night that will be my last. Following that last night will be my final day on earth. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be the next day. It may not even be for the next 50 years, I don't know. But it will come.

I guess the best way to sum up my thanatophobia is to explain the feeling you would probably be overcome by, knowing you are about to die, is how I feel almost all the time. It is a constant state of fear, of worry, of anxiety. Sometimes the sheer desperation of the situation, the situation that everyone who is born must inevitably face, manifests in what I am forced to call a panic attack.

Panic attacks are defined as "episodes of intense fear or apprehension that are of sudden onset and of relatively brief duration." To clearly define a panic attack, many specialists believe that at least four of the following symptoms should be experienced:

• Clear intense panic
• Palpitations, or accelerated heart rate
• Sweating
• Trembling or shaking
• Muscle tension
• Blurry vision
• Sensations of shortness of breath or smothering
• Feeling of choking
• Feeling waves of being flushed
• Chest pain or discomfort
• Nausea or abdominal distress
• Feeling dizzy, unsteady, lightheaded, or faint
• Derealisation (feelings of unreality) or depersonalization (being detached from oneself)
• Fear of losing control or going insane
• Fear of dying
• Paresthesias (numbness or tingling sensations)
• Chills or hot flashes
• Weakness in the knees
• Confusion
• Tunnel vision
• Blank mind
• Sensing time going by very slowly
• Feeling the need to escape
• Feeling of warmth inside, expanding from within
• Head pressure, unlike headache

In my moments of thanatophobia-induced panic, I have at some point, experienced all of these symptoms and consistently experience 15 of the 25 symptoms. However (and this is very much a point of interest to my psychologist and my psychiatrist) the most glaringly obvious sign of my panic and distress that he hasn't heard of before is my uncontrollable, piercing and blood-curdling screams. I actually reach a state of such frenzy and desperation that I scream, so long and so loudly I often lose my voice for up to four days.

The sound of my screams, usually somewhere between 1am and 4am, would wake my father up with a chilling fright. He has often marvelled that our neighbours have never called the police to report a potential crime. He's explained this as being due to us living on acreage or thanks to the Genovese Syndrome, the bystander effect where witnesses often tend to believe someone else will help. It is because of this that I even found myself in the uncomfortable situation of explaining to my new neighbours, who shared apartment walls with me in my new unit block, that if they were woken by my late night screaming I was simply having a panic attack. I actually had to promise my neighbours that if I was ever in danger I would scream real words such as, "help me, please!" so they would be able to assist me.

I don't remember much about these intense screaming panic attacks. My psychologist is even wary of calling them that, but I have no other word for them. I've been told I scream 'What if I'm wrong?' This alludes to my Buddhist beliefs but obviously, if I am wrong, what is there? Is there nothing? And that is ultimately my base fear. Ceasing to exist. And then I scream.

I do not have these panic attacks in daylight hours – although I have come dangerously close in cinemas. I do however have the traditional panic attacks. I will feel as if everything is closing in on me, the sheer inevitability and overwhelming desperation at my lack of control of death renders me unable to function. I will gasp for breath, my heart will race, I will sweat and I will need to call someone to talk. I often choke down the phone, “talk to me! About anything!” My network of friends and family know not to ask questions and to just start rambling about the first thing that comes to mind – their job, football scores, traffic, the weather, anything to distract my mind. I focus on their voice and their words until I feel it’s safe to open my mouth without a blood-curdling scream escaping.

Miss SAMawdsley xx


PS: For help with Thanatophobia, please join my Facebook support group: Thanatophobia / Fear of death

Questions:

• Have you ever had a panic attack?
• Have you ever perhaps lost control and started screaming?
• What are your thoughts on thanatophobia or anxiety?

Check your emotional baggage!

Emotional baggage is something we all have. Sometimes we have so much we struggle and other times it feels like nothing more than a cute glo-mesh sling purse.

I'm one of those people that takes on so much emotional baggage, my own and others'. If somebody has a problem, I add it to my long list of things to worry about. My mind can race so fast that in all actuality, I sometimes can't recognise what it is in particular that I am worried about, just that I am worried. Sometimes if you could see all of my emotional baggage, I would resemble a Clyde Valley donkey...

There are other people, weird Zen-like creatures who, like miniature Buddhas consider emotional baggage and either deal with it or discard it. They hold onto nothing. I once read a story by a stressed out man who told of a conversation with his young daughter.

"Daddy, why are you sad?"
"I'm just worrying about some things."
"Well, if you can change it, change it and don't worry. If you can't change it there's nothing you can do, so don't worry."

That is an amazing attitude and I get that, I honestly do! But really, I just can't put it into practise. I can't quite explain why but I just can't. A sentiment I do understand is 'A problem shared is a problem halved'.

Well I stumbled across this site today. Emotional Bag Check. It's a site for everyone - as long as you love music, but really, who doesn't? When you click the link it will take you to a site with two options.

For the worriers, the donkeys, the stressed out, highly strung jack-in-the-boxes just waiting to unravel in an explosive and teary meltdown, there is this section. Once you can admit you have baggage, you check it here. It's a simple text box and you just rant. That part alone is a catharsis. I poured out everything. I just let it all out. I felt like crying as I wrote it but I kept going. Some things, as I wrote them down, I felt like there was no escape from - that I will be tethered to these problems forever. Others, seemed trivial. I imagined a stranger reading them and thinking to themselves, 'so what?' Perspective, you know? So after unloading as many problems as I could in what is probably a non-sensical rambling diatribe, I felt marginally better. I also gave them my email address. Nobody will see my email and I wasn't asked for my name or any other information. That is all I, the emotionally crippled, have to do. Easy and freeing.

For those peaceful free-thinkers with all the headspace in the world, there is this section. This person does something really wonderful and amazing. They read - the internet equvilant of listening - the problems of another. This person will be a perfect stranger and they will know nothing more about them than their problem. Now these individuals who live in their own personal Zen garden are usually great with helpful advice so it wouldn't be fair to deny them the chance to offer it. They do so in the form of a song. They think of a song that would cheer, uplift, inpsire or sympathtise with the emotional cripple. There's a database of songs on the site, you type in the song you've thought of and it will find it and you send it to the emotional cripple (without seeing their email address). You can add a short message if you like but that person will receive this song and message in their email inbox.

The exchange of baggage is now complete.

I tried out both. Quid pro quo. I checked my baggage in the hopes that someone will read it and send me a song - maybe every time I hear this song I can remember to be Zen-like and take two minutes to be calm and still. (I actually received two! See the songs I received below!) And to balance the Karma, I also sent a song. The baggage I am now sharing was from somebody who has had medical problems and now has another problem added to it. I sent them 'Beautiful Day' by U2 with the following message:

"The world is a beautiful place. It is even more so because you are in it. Be strong. xx"

Perhaps I should take my own advice sometimes, huh?

Miss SAMawdsley xx

Questions:

• Did you 'check your baggage'? What song did you receive?
• Did you carry someone else's baggage? What was the problem and what song did you send them?
• How do you deal with emotional baggage?

"Strong Enough" - Stacie Orrico

"As I rest against this cold hard wall, will you pass me by? 

Will you criticize me as I sit and cry? 

I had fought so hard and thought that all my battles had been won 

Only to find the war had just begun"

"When I'm gone" - Eminem

"Have you ever loved someone so much, you'd give an arm for?

Not the expression, no, literally give an arm for?

When they know they're your heart

And you know you were their armour

And you will destroy anyone who would try to harm her

But what happens when karma, turns right around and bites you?"